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Xark began as a group blog in June 2005 but continues today as founder Dan Conover's primary blog-home. Posts by longtime Xark authors Janet Edens and John Sloop may also appear alongside Dan's here from time to time, depending on whatever.

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Iran, I-exaggerate?

I have to admit: My reactions when I saw the headline-alert Tweet announcing the "Iranian naval showdown" story were not pleasant. My first thought was that our government was hyping whatever happened for political reasons. My second thought was that the News Lords were going to uncritically pound that hype right into the national consciousness.

I don't like either thought, but that's where I find myself today. The federal government says something, and I have to discipline my reaction to make sure that I at least give it the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't this way before 2004, but that where I am now, and it's based on experience, not ideology. The Bush administration certainly didn't invent politicized bullshit (Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?), it's just that ... great Gawd, there's just so much of it, and the skeptical reporting is just so slow to catch up that it's practically irrelevant.

The good news is that the bullshit-exposure cycle appears to be speeding up.

Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast had
come from shore, or from another ship nearby. They said it might have
come from one of the five speedboats even though it had none of the
expected ambient noise of motor, wind or sea.

The video released by the US implied that the warning
was part of a series of transmissions to the ships from the Iranian
craft. It turns out that the warning was added onto the video. It was a radio recording made separately.

The U.S. warships were not concerned about the possibility that the
Iranian boats were armed with heavier weapons capable of doing serious
damage. Asked by a reporter whether any of the vessels had anti-ship
missiles or torpedoes, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, Commander of the 5th
Fleet, answered that none of them had either of those two weapons.
"I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was
a sense of being afraid of these five boats," said Cosgriff.

And here's why this bugs me: Because we've apparently over-hyped this incident, it's hurting our credibility at a time when we need to be repairing
our credibility. Which means that it's taking the emphasis off the
provocative behavior of those Iranian boats, which -- if taken in the
proper context -- was a bad thing (just not an end-of-the-world thing).

Did the patrol boats violate our ships security zone? Yep. Did our Navy respond appropriately? Absolutely (absurd comments by
my former hero Ralph Peters notwithstanding). Is the diplomatic protest
we sent to the Iranians via the Swiss the correct action? Yep.

But the way the Pentagon/White House spun their over-reaction to this
incident looks like deliberate political propaganda, and you get the feeling that these yahoos actually think they're being clever. Their bluster may play to the
"I'm More Macho Than You" crowd at the GOP debates, but it
isn't helping us with our allies. And it isn't helping us with the
people we're trying to turn into partners. It's as if the current crop of White House aides are a bunch of one-trick-ponies, and their one trick is disingenuous partisan gamesmanship. It works to fire up the base and put liberals on the defensive back home, but it's doesn't exactly add up to a brilliant foreign policy.

People seem to have forgotten the Cold War, when "hostile acts" like
this were part of a strange little waltz that US forces and Soviet
forces danced for five decades. Our planes "paced" their planes. Their
ships "shadowed" our ships. Sometimes it was serious and led to
shooting; Other times it was playful -- just bored soldiers screwing
with each other (like the Czech Pioneer Service border guards who used to "threaten" us when we were walking through puddles, just to get a laugh when we dropped straight down into the mud, exactly as we'd been trained to do). You don't ignore such incidents. You look at them seriously, even when you know there's an element of humor to them. The one thing you don't do is freak out over them.

And a parting shot at the TV News Lords: You are not just the means of delivering this bullshit. You are partners in the creation of this bullshit. The Pentagon gives you the raw material, but you embellish it with dramatic words and dire tones and the narrative of crisis. They provide the tape: You provide the drama.

We're so damned interested in being compelling that we've lost track of a simple truth: Most things are kinda dull.

What I wouldn't give for a restoration of nation's our dull credibility right now.

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I didn't watch the debate last night, but from what I have read, it sounds like Ron Paul was the only one making any sense, at least on this issue:

I would certainly urge a lot more caution than I'm hearing here tonight. It reminds me of what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin. We went to war there, then, later on, found out there was a lot of false information.... We have five small speedboats attacking the U.S. Navy with a destroyer? They could take care of those speedboats in about five seconds. And here we're ready to start World War III over this?

According to several articles, when Romney criticized Paul for saying the US should avoid another war, some people actually applauded him.

Who are these people in the Republican party that would applaud that? And if you're on the fence about whether or not to vote Democrat or Republican in November, what more do you need to know?

Q: Sir, Tony Capaccio with Bloomberg News. A lot of people are going to wonder why was the U.S. Navy afraid of five small speed boats when the vessels encountered were fairly large and well- equipped. Can you give the public a sense of the potential damage these vessels, these even small vessels could have caused. Did they have any anti-ship missiles on them, for instance, or torpedoes?

ADM. COSGRIFF: Neither anti-ship missiles nor torpedoes, and I wouldn't characterize the posture of the U.S. 5th Fleet as afraid of these ships or these three U.S. ships afraid of these small boats. Our ships were making a normal transit of the Strait of Hormuz. They followed the procedures they've been trained to follow to increase their own readiness in the face of events like this, and as the Iranian behavior continued during this interaction, our ships stepped through there, increased readiness, the pace. And I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats. That said, we take the potential for a small craft to inflict damage against a larger ship seriously, and we would be irresponsible if we didn't.

And the story really began from leaks from the Pentagon. I mean, there were Pentagon officials apparently calling reporters and telling them that something had happened in the Strait of Hormuz, which represented a threat to American ships and that there was a near battle on the high seas. The way it was described to reporters, it was made to appear to be a major threat to the ships and a major threat of war. And that's the way it was covered by CNN, by CBS and other networks, as well as by print media.

Do you believe him? Does the anonymity and use of "apparently" bother you at all? Does it strike you odd, at all, that a journalist would "guess" that the sensationalism originated with a building ("the Pentagon") rather than a person or reporter?

There is no objective system for evaluating and quantifying the sourcing of material, and openly sourced material can be a misleading as anonymously sourced information. Not only that, but the original reports on this story -- which turned out to be incomplete and misleading -- weren't "guesses": they were straight from the "official" sources.

As for hedging: Hedging makes good sense in these kinds of stories, even if you're getting your info from "good" sources. You don't see the whole board.

I dunno whether this particular guy is any good whatsoever. I have no experience with him.

My unanswered question is this. Suppose one or more of the boats was loaded with explosives and did a suicide crash into a destroyer. How dangerous would that be.

Then, assuming it could be dangerous, when should the Navy shoot such a ship out of the water? If there is an assumed protective radius against such suicide crashes in the Navy manual, did any of the ships come inside such a radius?

That information was apparently not available and I count it a failure of the reporter who asked merely about missiles and torpedos which would presumably be visible to the Navy.